A group of Anonymous hackers launched a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the official website of the NASDAQ stock market as a form of support for the “99 percent.”

A Pastebin post reveals that Operation Digital Tornado began on February 12 at 2PM Greenwich Time and until February 14 it acquired a considerable number of targets.

“You know, The 99% movement of the people has started in the US and many other countries, targeting the last enemy of the humankind, i.e. Capitalism of the Liberal Democracy,” the hackers wrote.

“Now the people all around the Homeland have profoundly realized that Capitalism is dangerous, and thus have risen against it. The US government has applied every suppressive effort along with using its News imperialism to survive the effects of this movement.”

As a result of this operation, the nasdaq.com site was temporarily taken offline, the hackers revealing that future targets include the NASDAQ reporting web application, eSignel, CBOE, the Miami Stock Exchange, and BATS Stock Exchange.

According to The Hacker News, BATS already reported being attacked, but their representatives said that the trading systems were not affected.

NASDAQ also confirmed being targeted by a DDOS attack that disrupted access to their site, but they state that the website was not hacked and no information was obtained by the attackers.

In the past period, hackers began relying more and more on DDOS attacks to make their protest messages known. The most successful series of attacks of this kind were the ones launched by Anonymous supporters after US authorities shut down the popular file-sharing site Megaupload.

In more recent events, the official sites of the CIA and the DHS were temporarily taken offline using the same tactics.

On the other hand, the IRC channel where anti-ACTA protesters gather to launch attacks against the sites of copyright holders and anti-piracy outfits is recording a drop in popularity, the last time we had checked, only 178 users being online.